Fifty years after the Civil Rights Act

From L, David Goodman, brother of the late civil rights activist Andrew Goodman and president of the Andrew Goodman Foundation, looks on as Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) speaks during a news conference in support of the Voting Rights Amendment Act, on Capitol Hill, June 24, 2014 in Washington, DC.Drew Angerer / GETTY

On June 21, 1964, Andrew Goodman sent his parents a postcard from Meridian, Mississippi. He wanted them to know that he had arrived safely to begin his summer job.

“This is a wonderful town,” he wrote. “I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good.”

Goodman had gone to Mississippi to help disenfranchised black Americans register to vote. He had joined an army of young activists in “Freedom Summer,” the high-water mark of the civil rights movement.

Goodman’s father Robert was a civil engineer, his mother Carolyn a clinical psychologist. They were liberal Jews from the Upper West Side of New York, dedicated to human rights and social justice.

At 20, Andrew studied drama and anthropology. It was natural, 50 years ago, that he would be drawn to Mississippi. Dangerous? Carolyn packed bandages and iodine in his suitcase.

The afternoon of June 21, Goodman and his young colleagues – Michael Schwerner and James Chaney – were driving through Philadelphia, Miss. The sheriff pulled them over for “speeding,” then arrested, detained and released them late that night.

The local Ku Klux Klan were waiting outside town. They shot them all, after savagely beating Chaney, who was black. Their bodies were dumped in an earthen dam and not found for 44 days, a story Hollywood tells in “Mississippi Burning.”

It was a ghastly postscript to the passage of the Civil Rights Act that month which Lyndon Baines Johnson would sign on July 2, 1964. The murders underscored the urgency of that momentous legislation enacted 50 years ago, the greatest achievement of American democracy in response to its greatest wrong.

Today it is hard to imagine Andrew Goodman’s America. Or why a young, urban, handsome Jewish aspiring actor went into the piney woods and crawling kudzu and why the politicians of his time struggled with racial equality. Could it happen today in the face of a similar injustice?

Protest was contagious in 1964; belatedly, violently, a somnolent America was somersaulting into the 1960s. The foot-soldiers of Freedom Summer were the heirs to the Freedom Riders, the lunch-counter sitters and the street protesters. They were the avant-garde of a swelling activism that would crest over the Vietnam War. There was commitment among that generation unseen among their counterparts today, for whom political protest and public service hold little interest.

It did for Goodman, whose mother said she could not have dissuaded him from going – and would not have tried, anyway.

“He ennobled me,” she told me decades later. In her sweet son’s memory, she founded a foundation dedicated to youth and civic involvement, among other issues.

As Andrew Goodman responded personally, the government responded legislatively. Yet that historic bipartisanship of 1964 is as unlikely today as Goodman’s courage.

Johnson knew that the bill could not pass without moderate mid-western and northern Republicans to compensate for defiant southern conservative Democrats. The filibustering critics insisted that ending racial discrimination in stores, hotels and restaurants denied the freedom of proprietors.

But Republicans such as the theatrical Senator Everett Dirksen and Representative William McCulloch saw an evil system and recoiled. In 1963, before the Tea Party, the rise of ideology and the passing of progressive Republicans, this was still possible.

And so, the Republicans supported the bill, silenced the Southerners, and gave historic meaning to what Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were doing in Dixie.

In 2014, Congress splits along party lines on immigration, debt and everything else; Obamacare was passed without almost any Republicans, unprecedented in the history of the republic for landmark legislation. Critics said reforming healthcare would undermine personal freedom, much as critics said in 1964 about ending segregation.

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